VMware CEO says it's time to get professional about the cloud
- Summary:
- VMware has has pulled together a soup-to-nuts package of tools and services to provide prospective customers with hybrid cloud and the comfort-blanket of VMware doing it all for them.
The underlying theme of this week's European version of VMworld, held in Barcelona, could be summed as a valediction of the value of cloud services to businesses in general and the vast army of VMware customers the world over in particular.
The company is obviously well aware that many of those customers are on the conservative side as large enterprises, and have rarely been classed as early adopters of any technology.
Now, as VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told the conference delegates in his opening keynote presentation, the time has come for cloud services to play a professional part in delivering applications and business services for those customers.
The focus now for VMware is to provide its extensive customer base with the infrastructure tools they will need to build and deliver those services.
This, Gelsinger says, will be hinged around the establishment of hybrid cloud services as the de facto norm for all of them, where the ability to run the same applications and services, in the same environment, both on-premise and/or the cloud as is deemed appropriate, will become standard practice for many of them.
He uses a phrase now starting to get some traction amongst industry observers, suggesting that these users now had the opportunity to become `software-defined enterprises' working with software-defined datacenter (SDDC).
It was in fulfilling the creation of SDDCs that most of the raft of product upgrades and enhancements announced at the conference were targeted.
The goal for the company is to be in a position to provide its customers with everything they might need to pull together existing datacenter resources and services and turn them into a coherent SDDC environment.
By and large it can be said that they do now look pretty close to having most bases covered, at a time when most of those customers are ready "or close to it“ to make the move into exploiting cloud services.
One new announcement, though still something of an `upgrade' one, was the arrival of vCloud Air, an enhanced and rebranded vCloud Hybrid Service. This provides cloud resources and services to those moving out into the cloud, The company is to open a new vCloud Air datacenter in Germany to satisfy the demand from German users for that ultimate data sovereignty defence of keeping essential data within national boundaries.
VMware has also added a raft of new service provider partners around the world, and now boasts of having a network of 3,900 of them in over 100 countries around the world.
This in itself is interesting because VMware has, over the last year, become a staunch supporter of the OpenStack cloud infrastructure. Its own implementation is currently in beta.
This is, of course, open source software and one of its underlying advantages is the potential it provides for applications and service portability between different service providers. There is, however, talk of this being difficult to achieve in practice.
By offering OpenStack through this extensive network of partners and VMware-owned datacentres, coupled with its own consistent suite of management and service provision tools, the company should be able to offer a proprietorial universality, where enterprise users can access a worldwide network of consistent services that overcomes any doubts about differences in implementations of the architecture by different service providers.
Updates galore
Though the core story will certainly be of interest to the company's customer base, the actual announcement of component parts was largely a collection of updates and enhancements, designed to realise the objective.
There was, for example, Version 5.8 of the vCloud Suite, while Version 6 of vSphere is now in beta and coming next year. Beta versions of Virtual Volumes and Virtual SAN2.0 were also announced.
One of the more major announcements was a significant extension to vRealize, turning it into a full management suite that provides a single Unified Management Platform for on and off premise use, for cloud automation, and cloud operations.
Said to be purpose-built for the hybrid cloud, this now includes a major update of vRealize Operations (which was formerly VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite), a new DevOps delivery tool, vRealize Code Stream to enable DevOps teams to deliver frequent, reliable software releases, and the beta launch of vRealize Air Compliance, a new addition to VMware's family of cloud management SaaS offerings.
vRealize Code Stream did beg the question as to whether VMware is up to eating its own dog food. The perception is that the company is still firmly stuck in the waterfall application development model that generates large application upgrades every 18 months or so. However, it turns out the company is using the DevOps approach, at least to some extent. Enhancements and updates to vCloud Air, which the company first introduced last year, are now delivered using the DevOps approach.
It did seem strange that Gelsinger didn't take the opportunity to point out the company is eating its own dog food here.
The other key announcement in the provision of SDDC services was that of EVO. This an appliance-based, over-arching management and provisioning environment that is aimed at providing SDDCs as a packaged offering.
There will be two versions with the first, EVO Rail, being targeted at servicing the needs of the SMB community. The goal is for service providers to be able to deploy a relatively straightforward cloud service within 15 minutes. Each appliance has four nodes, but it is possible to cascade four of them together, so it is expected to be able service the needs of a wide swathe of the lower end of VMware's customer base.
This will be followed by the more comprehensive implementation, EVO Rack, which will be targeting the large enterprise.
Though HP has been a VMware virtualization technology partner for many years, it has now also become a specific partner for EVO Rail, joining Dell, EMC, Fujitsu Supertmicro and Hitachi. As part of this development VMware has joined the Open Compute Project and is contributing the EVO Rail technology to it.
My take
Though it would be easy to brand VMware as a johnnie-come-lately scrambling onto the cloud bandwagon to protect its large vested interests, it is fair to observe that many of its enterprise customers will be nervous of taking the step without the support of long-standing, trusted vendors. To that end it is easy to suspect that many of them will now breathe a sigh of relief and take the plunge.
Longer term, however, the more interesting question is how many new customers this comprehensive package is likely to win for the company.